Monday, September 21, 2015

The
first half of my 6 months in the great nation of Mexico was cloaked in surfing
and studying Spanish. The memories taste like salt, and in my ears I remember that
Latin “es” hissing its way across the Pacific beaches. This changed as I moved
inland to drift among the high plains with the cool temps. My time was spent soaking
up the culture and staring at pyramids. I packed away my surfboards and pulled
out a jacket, and mostly spoke English with ex-pats. Those were wonderful weeks
but it’s since changed again. The temperatures on the Caribbean side are back
to “completely unacceptable” and because there is no surf on this side I
specialize in snorkeling and sweating and swatting at mosquitoes. It’s a good
thing I can hold my breath so long, because it’s hard to sweat and get bit at
depth.

And Then There Were
Two Of Me

We just beamed down

Comparison courtesy of the beautiful Denise Flury

I
love my brother so much, and I am so fortunate that he loves me too. We never
married. We never had kids. When we’re together it is undiluted and powerful.
Zero pulls from other alliances. We have each other and that wonderful mother
of ours, (All hail Birdy Mae!) and that is it…

The Momma!

I
picked him up at the Cancun airport and that’s where I would drop him off 3
weeks later after driving the Mayan Riviera south to the Belize border and then
back north.

If you know Skinny, count
yourself privileged. He is the most creative, enigmatic human to ever powerwalk
the planet. The best of us aren’t even on Facebook. The rest of us throw our
shoulders out trying to pat ourselves on the back with each post. Not him. This
guy doesn’t even own a phone. Not even a flip phone. You can’t call or text him
and when you are with him there are no distractions. He knows what he’s doing,
and he knows exactly who he is. He’s an original, who has written and recorded
2 albums of music, forgotten more magic tricks than you’ll ever know, designed
a game, speaks Japanese (after spending 14 years in Tokyo!), is a charm to
spend hours with, and my only sibling.

Yucan-Look-At
Pyramids

Palenque

There is a dirt road that will take you to a spot where
the Yucatan hits the Caribbean Sea, and the place is called Xpu-Ha. Mayan. It’s
all Mayan around here. Full respect. I’ve been to Egypt and I’ve seen their
Pyramids, and they are no doubt impressive, but the sheer volume of the
thousands of Pyramids here is mind blowing. They are everywhere! I’m pretty
sure at this point that every hill is a pyramid waiting to be unearthed. A
detour we were forced to take put us on a road with a perfectly symmetrical
field of uniform mounds still covered in jungle. What do you think those were?

Uxmal

Skinny, Benny, Bobby

We met a French Canadian guy named Benny in Calderitas
and adopted him as our mascot. Great guy. We made room for him in the cab of
the truck and he pitched his tent next to Elsie for 10 nights. We played soccer
with kids on the beach, ruined our beers with michelada sauce, snorkeled
ancient Spanish cannons, climbed pre-Columbian pyramids, and swam in caves. Essentially
we lived every 15 year olds fantasy. Good thing I never grew up.

In this chapter of “scaring the hell out of my mom”, we
take an in-depth look at submerged claustrophobia in a third world cave dive.

Welcome to the Yucatan : the rivers, streams, creeks – all waterways - are
underground, and occasionally the water flowing beneath the earth’s surface
washes away enough structural integrity to cause a collapse. They call it a
“Cenote”. This sinkhole becomes the access point for an amazing web of water
filled tunnels, and caverns that were once dry caves but are now flooded.
Here’s the video my dive buddy made of me. In some of the shots it’s difficult
to believe that we are completely submerged since the water clarity is so perfect.

There was a moment that I will never admit to, in which the panic grabbed me by
the throat and I just knew that an immediately impending watery struggle would soon
end in a horrific death after ripping all my fingernails out against the
limestone. I had to forcibly calm myself and continue to follow the “string of
life” that is tied from rock to rock and shows the way out of this teeter
tottering maze of fear and excitement. And then it subsided. What was that? I
thought I didn’t get that anymore. I thought the sea taught me to stare down
anything. Maybe good, maybe bad. Maybe still human. Hmmm.

The
Added Bonus Of International Travel

It isn’t only about Mexico. The great thing about travel
is that you meet people from all over. I got drunk with a Canadian girl and
told her that whenever I can tell that a confrontation is coming to a head I
try to let it out that I’m from Canada (I’m not from Canada) so that my future
enemy won’t slam my country for something stupid that I did. I’ll say something
like, “If we were in Toronto right now, that crap wouldn’t be tolerated.” She
said, “That’s cool, whenever I break something in a bar, I always start
chanting, USA! USA!” What a class act we are.
Building bonds between borders. I’m just doing my part for international
relations.

Good
Bye Mexico

The hygiene: I've watched
cooks open packages of cheese with their teeth, cough into their hands and then
flake it into my salad. That's immediate familiarity, minus the benefits, and
with lasting effects. Go straight to fever and dysentery, do not stop at go, do
not collect $200. Is there a sweeter bunch of hardworking honest people you’d
rather get sick with? Whenever a person makes a broad sweeping generality they
are doomed to look like an idiot but I’m willing to risk it anyway: “I love
Mexicans.” I never would have said that as a white kid growing up in the
Southwest of America but that was ignorance, and I was wrong. They are
excellent people and I’m a huge fan.

They are poor, they know
they are poor and there is no shame in being poor. In fact, I’d go one step
further and say that they actually have a sense of pride in being poor because
that’s the norm. Humility goes a long way and I have much more to learn and
nearly nothing to teach. Because the following story is completely true I am
leaving details out so I don’t embarrass my friend.

We’d been drinking buddies for
a week, and in those hazy drunken hours we spoke of our dreams, and our curses,
and our windfalls and our broken hearts, and the ones who lifted a hand and
pulled us back to sanity. We’re the same age and we’d become friends. And for
every drink I bought this local he repaid it in kind with the next round or the
next evening. I’ve had plenty of lopsided foreign relationships were I ended up
being the sponsor for someone else’s drinking habit. This was not one of those.
I won’t type his name out of respect. I know he’s reading this and he knows
what’s coming next. I’ll try to muster
all the grace I can.

He’d been in Elsie and
eventually he invited me back to his home. As we stood outside the gate, he
fumbled with the key, and he said the following words; “Now, Roberto – I am very
poor, but don’t feel badly for me. I am happy and I have enough.” I wasn’t
prepared for what was on the other side of that gate. It was poverty on a level
I’d never seen outside of some barren islands in Indonesia. It was 3 walls with
a tarp amidst the ruins of an old building. There were 2 horrible couches, no
running water and hijacked electricity from the building next door. He was
squatting in what looked like a bombed out building in Fallujah.

Then it got worse. “Roberto, when I left this
city as a teenager I swore I would never again return because my childhood was
so hard. But, life takes detours and I am again here in my childhood home, back
with my mother who raised me.” Then it dawned on me, this wasn’t a new
predicament. This is where he was born and raised and this is where he lives again with
his mother on one couch and he on the other and a tarp over their heads. Oh
god, the realization felt like I was 100 feet under water and someone had just
turned off the valve on my scuba tank. I thought I might throw up if I could
only breathe. I finally blinked. I swallowed hard and said something about the
mosquitos and needing to leave due to the bites. I know he felt my discomfort.
I wasn’t hiding it successfully. I stumbled away carrying my soul crushing
despair and the depression it caused in me was actually physical. When I’d
walked a couple miles away, I called my mom. I cried while I spoke to her. It
had really affected me.

But what exactly had done this to me? I’d seen poverty
before. I lived in the poverty stricken 3rd world for 6 years while
on Barraveigh. Then I remembered his words before he unlocked the gate; “I am
happy and I have enough.” And with those utterances replaying in my mind, the
slightest glimmer of beauty began to inch its way in. The hope this man
displayed in his humble yet resilient attitude was spreading in my thoughts and
it buoyed my damaged spirit. Thinking back, I believe that what hit me so hard
was the realization that I am not man enough to move forward with those odds
stacked against me like he was doing every day, and I never will be. I had come
face to face with a better man than me, and the truth is, I did that every day
in Mexico and didn’t even know it.

The Dream

In the 90’s I spent a year backpacking in Europe. That experience was the single most defining event in my life. Then I spent the next 15 years designing my future, so that I could repeat that sojourn on a global level with all my toys included. I created a mantra that I chanted on a daily basis. 4 maxims to live by:1.) Don’t Get Married2.) Don’t Reproduce3.) Don’t Get Injured4.) Don’t Get In Trouble With The Law.

I navigated through those life altering reefs and dodged all those looming icebergs. I MADE IT! I resigned my position, rented my house, sold everything else, and left all that was familiar behind. It was Dec 1, 2005. I was a naïve American thrusting myself upon the world in a campaign of adventure. I had accepted the grandest challenge I could think of: SAILING AROUND THE WORLD. It took me 6 years and I made it half way around (San Diego to Singapore) and then my house burned down. I went back to California for 3 years to rebuild. And now? Now I'm driving an old truck with a camper to the farthest reaches of South America and back. These are my stories . . . .